Unicode-based FreeBSD

[Ed Schouten]

Hello Alexander,

* Alexander Churanov <alexanderchuranov at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1) Is unicode support in character-mode (I mean plain tty, not Xorg) FreeBSD
> human interface alreay implemented?

Yes and no.

Right now, you can just use UTF-8 inside ncurses and there is nothing
that actually stops you from writing pieces of console software that
supports UTF-8.

But there is one problem with TTY's: when you switch your terminal to
canonical mode (where it processes entire lines of text at a time), it
cannot properly perform backspace on exotic characters, because the
characters are both variadic in bytes and columns. Linux has this IUTF8
flag for termios, which we don't support (yet).

I am not sure how profitable it is to implement this. It makes the TTY
code a lot more complex than it is right now. I think 90% of the time,
the TTY is configured to run in non-canonical mode anyway. I think we
should let this wait until we have an UTF-8 capable syscons.

-- 
 Ed Schouten <ed at 80386.nl>
 WWW: http://80386.nl/
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